Happy Sales Kickoff Season

Great to see everyone at BattleFin Miami this week. Enjoy this reading if you’re on your flight home. Next week I’ll be at Data Driven NYC. Please say hi if you are there as well. Since last post we’ve seen 6 acquisitions, 7 fundraising rounds, 19 people moves & promotions, 8 roles, 2 articles, 3 podcasts, an exciting new company launch, and 4 newly added events.

M&A

• Adrian Binks and General Atlantic acquired Hg Capital’s share in Argus Media (energy and commodity data) in a deal valuing the company at $4.6B.

• Babel Street acquired Vertical Knowledge (data collection and analysis).

• Circana acquired Golf Datatech (golf industry market research).

• EVORA Global acquired Metry (energy data collection).

• TRG Screen acquired Xpansion (reference data usage monitoring).

• Voltron Data acquired Claypot AI (real-time processing).

*transactions have been announced but may not be closed

Fundraising

• Anomalo (data quality) raised $33M in a growth round led by SignalFire.

• Bagel (machine learning data network) raised $3.1M in a Pre-Seed round led by CoinFund.

• Heex (smart data platform) raised €6M.

• Masa (data monetization and marketplace) raised $5.4M in a Seed round led by Anagram.

• Nikkei made a strategic investment in Wilshire Indexes (benchmarks & indices).

• TextQL (AI data analyst) raised $4.1M in a Pre-Seed round led by Neo and DCM.

• VanEck made a strategic investment in CCData (digital asset data and index solutions).

People Moves, Promotions, and Appointments

• Tim Anderson was promoted to Director,

• Peter Bradbury joined VideoAmp as Chief Commercial and Growth Officer.

• Sam Campbell joined Triple Private Equity as Principal.

• Samik Chandarana was promoted to CIB Head of Digital Banking at J.P. Morgan.

• Michael Chin joined Duco as CEO.

• Andrew Cleland joined Techstars as Chief Investment Officer.

• Kellyn Cochell joined Continuus Technologies as Chief Revenue Officer.

• Sarah Heffron Nichomoff was promoted to CIB Chief Data & Analytics Officer at J.P. Morgan.

• Stephen Helm was promoted to Managing Director at kACE.

• David Karp was promoted to Chief Customer Officer at DISQO.

• Jeff Koeneman was promoted to Chief Experience Officer at TIFIN.

• Grant Lowden joined SimCorp as Head of Go To Market Verticals.

• Brian Mahlstedt joined Hedgineer as a Partner.

• Eugene Miculet was promoted to Director, Data Sourcing and Strategy at WorldQuant.

• Jack Near was promoted to Director in the Verticalized Software, Data & Analytics (VSDA) Group at Cowen.

• Daniel Parker joined Permutive as Chief Revenue Officer.

• Nihar Raut joined Millennium as Data Scientist.

• Hemen Sampat was promoted to Executive Director, Research Data Transformation and Management at J.P. Morgan.

• Jonathan Slogoff joined Nirvana Solutions as Managing Director, Business Development.

*New Company Alert*

Catena Clearing was founded by Jeremy Baksht, CEO (former Walmart Data Ventures and Bloomberg), Travis May, Chairman (former LiveRamp and Datavant, current Shaper Capital), and Mike Goynes, CTO (former Util, Interos, and Optoro).

The company is designing a more connected, efficient, and transparent backbone for suppliers and retailers to track goods from suppliers to point-of-sale.

Check out the website and give them a follow to learn more. Jeremy will also be at Manifest Vegas February 5-7.

Who’s Hiring

• Antenna is hiring a VP, Client Services.

• Coolwater Capital is hiring a Head of Platform.

• Datarade is hiring a Head of Engineering.

• Norstella is hiring a Managing Partner, Commercial Strategy & Analytics and a New Business Development, Director.

• Placer.ai is hiring a Account Director - Finance and a Senior Account Executive.

• S&P Global is hiring a Head of Internal Product Management.

New Products & Partnerships

Two announcements from Bloomberg this week:

• Availability of AI-Powered Earnings Call Summaries on the Terminal. Info

• Integration of Shipfix key commodities and freight data into the Terminal.

What I’m Reading

• How to Monetise Data in 2024 by Matthew Bernath.

• Court rules in favor of a web scraper, Bright Data, which Meta had used and then sued by Sarah Perez in TechCrunch.

What I’m Listening To

• Founder Spotlight Podcast episode featuring Mark Gerson in discussion with Eric Rosen.

• The Alternative Data Podcast episode featuring Matt Ober in discussion with Mark Fleming-Williams.

• Interview: The multibillion dollar data market boom fueled by generative AI & why AI data innovation will come faster from small companies featuring Brad Schneider in discussion with Rachelle Akuffo.

Upcoming Events

*new events added since last newsletter

• Data Day Texas, January 27, Austin

• Data Driven NYC with Benedict Evans, Weaviate, Patronus & Foursquare, January 30, NYC

• *Bloomberg Quant (BBQ) Seminar Series, January 30, NYC

• CannaDataCon, February 1-2, Miami

• Chill Data Summit, February 6, NYC

• *Robin Hood Opportunity x AI Summit, February 6, NYC

• *Low-Key Data Happy Hour, February 6, NYC

• IFRS Sustainability Symposium, February 22, NYC

• Gartner Data & Analytics Summit, March 11–13, Orlando

• Skiers in Data (SKID) by LEIT Data, March 24, Verbier Switzerland

• New York FinTech Week, April 8-12, NYC

• *Data Universe, April 10-11, NYC

• Insight Innovation Exchange (IIEX), April 17-18, Austin

Views here are my own and not of my current or former employers.